Research Paper
A Study on Subjective Well-being Indicators
1995 Volume 18 Issue 2 Pages 52-61
Details
1995 Volume 18 Issue 2 Pages 52-61
The distinction between bottom-up and top-down approaches is popular in modern psychology, and parallel questions can be found throughout the scholarly history of happiness (Diener, 1984). Still, this problem has been unsolved in subjective well-being studies.
From a viewpoint of cognitive science, this paper examines the distinction between bottom-up and top-down causations in reporting subjective well-being. As a new method, the author focuses on where a subject drives his attention to and shows that a top-down causation is dominant in reporting satisfaction level of life. Form this result, it can be said that the current way of modeling subjective well-being indicators is problematic to some extent.
